The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Amazon Deal or No Deal

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-01-24

"Hey Alexa, can you help Amazon with their math?" Timothy W. wrote.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-24

A Short Year

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2020-01-23

Are we sick of of year rollover bugs yet? Well, let’s just agree that people aren’t sick of making these kinds of bugs.

A long time ago, someone at Oleksandr’s company needed to write a Python script that shipped a 4-digit year to a system that only accepted 2-digit years. So 2010 needed to turn into 10.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-24

Two Heads Are Better Than One

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-01-22

What, exactly set of features divide a "text editor" from an IDE is a bit of a blurry line. Developers are not the sort to use static, unchangeable tools. They want configuration, they want plugins, they want quick access to a terminal, they want debugging support, and they'll bolt those features into just about anything.

There's a fine line between an IDE that provides nice utility to the developer, and an IDE which is opinionated. I had the misfortune long ago to use the WebSphere IDE, which was essentially a repackaged version of early Eclipse bundled with highly opinionated plugins about how you were supposed to build a Java application. As Matt puts it: "An IDE is, to some, a high-functionality tool for developing applications, and to others a classic example of an Inner Platform."

42 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-24

An Enterprise API

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-21

There’s a simple rule about “enterprise” software: if the word “enterprise” is used in any way to describe the product, it’s a terrible product. Enterprise products are usually pretty special purpose and serve a well-capitalized but usually relatively small market. You aren’t going to sell licenses to millions of companies, but maybe tens of thousands. Often hundreds. There are some extremely niche enterprise products that have only two or three customers.

Lots of money, combined with an actually small market in terms of customers, guarantees no real opportunity for competition. Couple that with the fact that each of your customers wants the off-the-shelf product you’re selling them to have every feature they need for their business case, you’re on a fast track to bloated software, inner platforms, and just general awfulness.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-24

Painful Self-Development

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2020-01-20

Daniel didn't believe the rumor at first. Whenever his company chased after the hottest new business trends, they usually pursued the worst trends imaginable. But word was that this time, they'd seen fit to mimic Google’s fabled "20% Time."

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-22

Text Should Go Here

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-01-17

"The fact that Microsoft values my PC's health over copyediting is why I thumbed up this window," Eric wrote.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-24

Switch Off

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-16

There are certain things which you see in code that, at first glance, if you haven’t already learned better, look like they might almost be clever. One of those in any construct that starts with:

switch(true) {…}

43 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-23

Y2K15

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-01-15

We’re still in the early part of the year, and as little glitches show up from “sliding window” fixes to the Y2K bug, we’re seeing more and more little stories of other date rollover weirdness in our inbox.

Like, for example, the Y2K15 bug, which Encore got to get surprised with. It feels like date issues are turning into a sports game franchise: new releases of the same thing every year.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-16

Gormless and Gone

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2020-01-14

There’s always a hope that in the future, our code will be better. Eventually, we won’t be dealing with piles of krufty legacy code and unprepared programmers and business users who don’t understand how clicking works. It’s 2020: we officially live in the future. Things aren’t better.

Duane works in Go, and has a piping hot “Representative Line” written in 2020. If, like me, you don’t quite know Go, it still looks pretty terrible at first glance:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-24

An Unreal Json Parser

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-13

As we've discussed in the past, video game code probably shouldn't be held to the standards of your average WTF: they're operating under wildly different constraints. So, for example, when a popular indie game open sources itself, and people find all sorts of horrors in the codebase: hey, the game shipped and made money. This isn't life or death stuff.

It's a little different when you're building the engine. You're not just hacking together whatever you need to make your product work, but putting together a reusable platform to make other people's products work.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-22

Are You Old Enough to Know Better?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-01-10

"I guess my kid cousins won't be putting these together for a while," Travis writes.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-16

The Compliance Ropeway

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2020-01-09

"So, let me get this straight," Derrick said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath while massaging his temples before letting out an exasperated sigh. "Not a single person... in this entire organization... is taking ANY responsibility for Ropeway? No one is even willing to admit that they know anything about this application...?"

The Operations team had grown accustomed to their new director's mannerisms and learned it's just better to stay silent and let Derrick think out loud. Afterall, no one envied his job or his idealistic quest for actual compliance. If had he been at the bank as long as his team had, Derrick would have learned that there's compliance... and then there's "compliance."

33 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-15

Sharing the Power

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-08

"For my sins," John writes, "I'm working on a SharePoint 2010 migration."

This tells us that John has committed a lot of sins. But not as many as one of his coworkers.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-12

Y-Ok

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-01-07

Twenty years out, people have a hard time remembering that Y2K was an actual thing, an actual problem, and it was only solved because people recognized the danger well ahead of time, and invested time and effort into mitigating the worst of it. Disaster didn’t come to pass because people worked their butts off to avoid it.

Gerald E was one of those people. He worked for a cellular provider as a customer service rep, providing technical support and designing the call-center scripts for providing that support. As 1999 cranked on, Gerald was pulled in to the Y2K team to start making support plans for the worst case scenarios.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-17

Yet Another Master of Evil

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-06

As a general rule, if you find yourself writing an extension system for your application, stop and do something else. It's almost always in the case of YAGNI: you ain't gonna need it.

George is a "highly paid consultant", and considers himself one of the "good ones": he delivers well tested, well documented, and clean code to his clients. His peer, Gracie on the other hand… is a more typical representative of the HPC class.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-08

Variable Trust

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-01-03

Brian writes, "Of course server %1 is trustworthy, I couldn't do my work without it!"

19 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-10

Untested Builds

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-01-02

Kaylee E made an "oops" and checked in a unit test with a bug in it which caused the test to fail. She didn't notice right away, and thus the commit hit their CI pipeline and was automatically pulled by the build server. She assumed that when she checked the logs she'd see the error, but she didn't. The build completed, and Tests (0/0) ran successfully.

Now, Kaylee was new to the codebase, and since she'd been doing small changes, she'd simply written and run tests around explicitly the functionality she was testing. She hadn't yet done a full test run locally, so that was her next step. From there, it was easy to see why the build server didn't automatically run tests.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-16

Best of 2019: When Unique Isn't Unique

by Jane Bailey in Best of… on 2020-01-01

We close out our recap of 2019 and head into the new year with one last flashback: when vendors forget what the definition of "unique" is. Original -- Remy

Gather 'round, young'uns, for a tale from the Dark Ages of mobile programming: the days before the iPhone launched. Despite what Apple might have you believe, the iPhone wasn't the first portable computing device. Today's submitter, Jack, was working for a company that streamed music to these non-iPhone devices, such as the Palm Treo or the Samsung Blackjack. As launch day approached for the new client for Windows Mobile 6, our submitter realized that he'd yet to try the client on a non-phone device (called a PDA, for those of you too young to recall). So he tracked down an HP iPaq on eBay just so he could verify that it worked on a device without the phone API.

6 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-07

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